Dr. Who

[Overly Serious]

But I never watch Doctor Who for the looks of the actors anyway so maybe people did find him ugly I don't know?

There were some reactions of "Eww, he's old..." from younger female viewers when he was revealed. I remember seeing someone's reaction to it. So it was a thing in a sense amongst certain segments, but it wasn't a widespread reaction. Peter Capaldi was relatively known in the UK at the time for his role in the political satire The Thick of It and well-regarded. I'd say for the majority of Who fans they approached it with an open mind and I'd go further and say for the majority of Who fans, they largely blamed the writing not Capaldi. It was starting to lose the "ooo, David Tennant" middle-aged woman demographic with Capaldi, I'll admit that.

As to the rest of your comments about Clara and River Song. I wholly agree about River Song and as we're bringing up attraction, trying to cast Alex Kingston as a sexy femme-fatale was doomed from the start as far as I'm concerned. Add in that the character of River Song was downright unpleasant and what you had was this very forced arc where we see a man we like fussing over a romantic partner we don't. Anyone who has had a friend who suddenly fell for someone you think is below them / not nice, will know that feeling. Possibly ironically, the only time River Song started to become likeable was in the small overlap she had with Capaldi. She never had a drop of chemistry with Matt Smith or David Tennant but Capaldi's slightly detached amusement did kind of work with her. There's a scene where she's extolling how the Doctor is like the sun itself to the villains unaware that Capaldi, standing next to her, is the latest incarnation. For a number of reasons, including that she's finally not looking like the Doctor's auntie and that the placing her at the centre of everything was now done with, there was a glimmer of okay-ishness at the end. But that's it.

With Clara, though, I think it's more of a tragedy. Because whilst everything you say about what they did with her in the plot is true and terrible, and that they increasingly shoved her into a more obnoxious role towards the end, the character originally was great. As was Jenna Louise-Coleman who was both very attractive and very fun. The character of Clara had this kind of frustrated superiority where you could see she was really used to being smarter than other people and then kept butting up against the Doctor who could out-think her and you got this really fun frisson between her slight superiority and the Doctor's continuous puncturing of it. But she was smart and she could actually help him. She and Matt Smith had great chemistry. I loved the scene on the roof in the Snowmen where he's clearly having fun testing her and she's kind of piqued about it but can't help herself. Which is why it's all the more tragic that they spoiled the character with the storyline they did and wrote her into the same sort of superior female role as River Song at the very end.

TL;DR: River Song bad. Clara spoiled.

 

[12345]

Oh I liked Clara, I just wish the companion had been Victorian Clara, not what we got. Not a fan of the 'Clara has always been there, or caused something.' . I didn't need to know why The Doctor took the TARDIS for his adventures, when originally it was a grandfather and a granddaughter out on learning adventures. She didn't need to be scattered throughout all his life to be special to the Doctor.

 

[UnKillFill]

As to the rest of your comments about Clara and River Song. I wholly agree about River Song and as we're bringing up attraction, trying to cast Alex Kingston as a sexy femme-fatale was doomed from the start as far as I'm concerned. Add in that the character of River Song was downright unpleasant and what you had was this very forced arc where we see a man we like fussing over a romantic partner we don't.

Yeah, she kind of had a G-Milf thing going with her and Matt Smith, and they definitely leaned into it in a way that would be creepy as hell if the sexes were reversed, but yeah, when she was younger...

(Side note, holy shit, how did I not know she was married to a pre-Voldemort Ralph Fiennes back in the day?)

 

[The Lawgiver]

Yeah, she kind of had a G-Milf thing going with her and Matt Smith, and they definitely leaned into it in a way that would be creepy as hell if the sexes were reversed, but yeah, when she was younger...

I liked the dynamic before they did the retroactive crazy bullshit regeneration power homunculus space fed sleeper agent thing where it was just like someone else who also was time travelling but without the buff of regeneration shit and supposedly just legally married long term to the doctor at some vague distant point in his future but then got separated due to some freaky time shit. The idea of "these two know each other really well and are romantically involved but each time we run into her it's at some different kinda opposite point in their timeline" was neat. Like even as stupid as the retconning of river song was at least her character stayed mostly consistent and it didn't DIRECTLY INTERFERE WITH THE PREMISE OF THE SHOW like the clara shit or the timeless child shit did. The doctor just being a super advanced alien equivalent of "just some fucking dude who possibly did important things in his races' society at some point but then decided to just time travel and explore space with a stolen ship?" Nah no see now he's ER I MEAN SHE WAS A SMALL BLACK CHILD FOUND AT A PORTAL BY A WHITE WOMAN NAMED TECTAYUN AND WAS PLAYING WITH A LITTLE BOY WHO PUSHED HER OFF A MASSIVE FUCKING CLIFF LEADING HER TO REGENERATE INTO ANOTHER KID WHICH GAVE TECTAYUN THE IDEA TO KILL THE CHILD LIKE 100 TIMES AND EXTRACT THEIR GENES TO SPLICE INTO HER OWN RACE AND THEN MINDRAPE THE CHILD INTO BELIEVING THEY WERE ALWAYS PART OF THEIR RACE AND THEN GIVE THEM A JOB AS A SPACE FED THAT KEPT HAVING THEIR MIND RAPED BETWEEN EACH MISSION FOR CONFIDENTIALITY'S SAKE WHO THEN EVENTUALLY BECAME A DUDE THAT WAS AN OLD MAN (never married or having kids because ohnoooo too human) AND THEN STEALS A TIME MACHINE NOT ON HIS OWN ACCORD, NOOOOO! BUT ON THE ACCORD OF SOME HUMAN WOMAN WHO INEXPLICABLY WAS THERE AND GUIDED HIM TO THE TARDIS TO STEAL.

The constant retcons of the last decade have unironically removed ALL agency from the title character and it's fucking insulting. This is a dude who as far back as his second story in the 1960s intentionally broke his time machine and lied about it because he wanted to explore the cool alien world they accidentally landed on. I'm surprised they didn't retcon that shit too.

 

[Return of the Freaker]

I liked River Song better when she was a doctor on ER

 

[chimpSculpture]

The idea of "these two know each other really well and are romantically involved but each time we run into her it's at some different kinda opposite point in their timeline" was neat.

River Song was another invention by Steven Moffat and it really shows. All of his ideas are really good but only in their debuts, if he follows the threads he's written they quickly fold.

The show isn't really about time travel, the time travelling is just a plot device to have a nomadic structure where characters and locations can be completely different in every episode. That and the Doctor being, not quite invincible, but essentially immortal are the two main reasons the show has been so long lasting. It's doesn't have to be tied down to it's previous baggage and can become fresh again at any moment.

But finally an interesting and unique concept that can only be told in a time travelling story was introduced by Moffat. River's concept of being another time traveller that's personally acquainted with him, but to him is instead a stranger from his future is engaging. The Tennant episode she's introduced is one of the bests in that era (just another reason series 3 and 4 are peak). We know how her story ends, actually how it started too with the diamond towers or whatever.

But quickly in her later episodes it falls apart. When I first watched her debut episode I didn't really realise she was married to him between multiple generations. Someone being married to an alien that changes appearance, personality or even sex every few years is actually really stupid. Her personality changes after her first episode to a much more annoying person too from what I remember? I swear there are multiple episodes Moffat wrote where she makes the same joke about wanting to fuck a copy of herself, literally fucking yourself? Stop it.

It's all a big shame because it's a really great idea to have a character like her for a long running story like Doctor Who. Moffat is an excellent writer, but probably shouldn't be a show runner in my opinion, long term at least. I guess he was better than all the show runners after him though. lol

 

[GilaCutter]

Craving some new Doctor Who content but refusing the touch the modern series with a ten foot pole, I settled on reading Doctor Who: Classic Comics from the 1990s which reprints old strips from various publications, mostly in color for the first time. I'm up to issue #4 and presumably due to the sheer abundance of them, every issue has probably at least two 3rd Doctor stories while the other two have been sparsely featured with a single story each issue, while Terry Nation's Dalek comics from the TV21 magazine are also reprinted (which explains the weird faux news blurbs in the corner of each page).

Some takeaways;
- The first Hartnell era comic, and in fact the very first Doctor Who comic ever, feels very dated, and I don't mean that in the sense most people would. In addition to featuring unique companions in the form of the Doctor's other grandchildren, very much approaching the character from the assumption that he originates from earth (while seeming to forget that in the very first episode of the series, he claimed to be from the earth's future so the comic already breaks the little actual canon that exists), the writing, the art and even the design of the aliens feel very much like something from the golden age of comic books, which just feels weird considering the comic is from 1964.
- The first Troughton era comic similarly feels very off, although this is more due to the fact he essentially acts the whole story solo and out of all the Doctors, he's probably the only one I can't imagine without any companions; in fact, right at the beginning of the story, he tells his out of frame companions to stay in the TARDIS, so we never see them, despite establishing that they are there. The story is also a bit naff, featuring a villain named Extortionist whose plan consists of nothing other than threatening to launch missiles at every planet in the galaxy unless his demands are met. At least the art has improved.
- The Pertwee era comics, while the stories are still a bit naff, definitely begin to capture the vibe of the actual series much better, and we even get an appearance from the Brigadier in one of the stories, which itself also stands out on the account of having a child villain who is not acting under the influence of aliens or any other sinister force but is merely a rotten kid. In hindsight, a story about a child genius brainwashing his boarding school classmates into hooligans almost feels like something they would've done during the McCoy era.

And as for the Dalek comic, it's hard to form an opinion. On the account of having rights to practically nothing besides the title character, Nation, who apparently managed to drag David Whitaker along, writes the Daleks as something of a villain protagonist, who conquer but also in turn face conquest themselves.

 

[The Great One]

I got 6 more classic dr who episodes on tape.
(Pictured with my aforementioned daleks box set is inferno, the 1995 remaster of the five doctors, the kings demons, the three doctors, the keepers of traken and survival.)

 

[The Lawgiver]

And as for the Dalek comic, it's hard to form an opinion. On the account of having rights to practically nothing besides the title character, Nation, who apparently managed to drag David Whitaker along, writes the Daleks as something of a villain protagonist, who conquer but also in turn face conquest themselves.

It kinda gradually got lost overtime in terms of characterization but the Daleks for a large-ish chunk of the classic dr. who era when not autistically screeching about how much they want to kill people (usually the doctor) they're shown actually planning shit or characterized in a way kinda like what you described. The very first dalek plot way back in the 60s they were mostly chill yet understandably somewhat untrusting ayys till they realized "oh shit our bodies are too adapted to radiation now we're fucking going to die"

Every appearance afterwards where they were antagonists they were conniving little shits that'd team up with some other guys or use slave labor of some kind to help their plan along (but also could hold their own as much as weird little crippled tank creatures could).

Last clip is kinda clickbaity-labelled, they explicitly are making a truce here and point out that it's only temporary till they get their shit together.
Somewhere along the way we lost this.

 

[crowabunga]

Somewhere along the way we lost this.

My bugbear is what's been done to the Cybermen, but on retrospect it does seem that all the Who villains got a conceptual "streamline" that was effectively a dumbing-down. Daleks lost their politics and espionage for raw GigaNazi murder rage, Cybermen went from conniving sociopathic posthumans to trauma-farming zombots; who else got the NuWho retardation treatment?

At least the Daleks got a bit of their politicking and conniving back into the 11th Doctor's run, but it was still marred by cartoonish notions descended from that initial NuWho streamlining, like their guns being fueled by rage, and them keeping an asylum of loony Daleks because a sufficient concentration of anger makes them get their rocks off. Fuck off, NuWho, proper Dalek guns run off of impossible sci-fi technology not muh emotions magic, and incurable Kaled mutants should be liquidated and their constituent nutrients reclaimed; the best of Dr. Who is occasionally Lovecraftian soft sci-fi, not pure space fantasy.

 

[GlupShitto]

My bugbear is what's been done to the Cybermen, but on retrospect it does seem that all the Who villains got a conceptual "streamline" that was effectively a dumbing-down. Daleks lost their politics and espionage for raw GigaNazi murder rage, Cybermen went from conniving sociopathic posthumans to trauma-farming zombots; who else got the NuWho retardation treatment?

At least the Daleks got a bit of their politicking and conniving back into the 11th Doctor's run, but it was still marred by cartoonish notions descended from that initial NuWho streamlining, like their guns being fueled by rage, and them keeping an asylum of loony Daleks because a sufficient concentration of anger makes them get their rocks off. Fuck off, NuWho, proper Dalek guns run off of impossible sci-fi technology not muh emotions magic, and incurable Kaled mutants should be liquidated and their constituent nutrients reclaimed; the best of Dr. Who is occasionally Lovecraftian soft sci-fi, not pure space fantasy.

Personally, I think the enshittifiication of both villains started in the 70s with Revenge of the Cybermen and Genesis of the Daleks respectively (although the Daleks had a rough few episodes prior to that).

 

[The Lawgiver]

Personally, I think the enshittifiication of both villains started in the 70s with Revenge of the Cybermen and Genesis of the Daleks respectively (although the Daleks had a rough few episodes prior to that).

Genesis of the daleks wasn't really about the daleks so much as it was the war and thinking about the possible consequences of fucking with important historical events. It makes sense there's not much of actual dalek type shit going down because it's supposed to be their earliest state of development (which also kind of retcons their origin from being similar to the cybermen of uninhabitable world survival methods leading to them looking like they do to them just being bioweaponized mutants driving a tank)

The more "subtle" aspects of daleks stayed in early-er nuwho but god somewhat hammered out sometime after the backlash for the new paradigm design. granted there were some weird bits like how when talking about the cult of skaro they acted like daleks weren't able to think like these specific elite ones normally as if there was some kind of inhibitor beyond the gene splicing that's never really brought up or implied again until matt smith times in the fucking asylum thing and then capaldi where they do the fanservice dalek skaro and nonsense and go "oh if a dalek says i love you it comes out as exterminate!"

Like nuwho's dalek appearance started with a fucking dalek who had wartime PTSD and was caged and chained up in some dude's basement alien art collection. Nothing special, nothing unique, just a standard no-name dalek and the doctor encountering each other after both their races were burnt to a crisp.

They took away a lot of the dalek's agency a little before they took away the doctor's agency with the timeless child shit

Also for some reason both the daleks and the cybermen now use nanomachines to convert people I don't know why that got added I don't know why that only was a thing for a bit it's retardedly overpowered and makes you just wonder "ok so why don't they use that when they invade a planet all the time when the doctor's not there"

 

[GilaCutter]

I wanted to say that the Daleks started slipping in terms of portrayal ever since Terry Nation stopped writing them after Genesis, but then I remembered that he also wrote Destiny of the Daleks which was a weird sidestep for them since it doesn't really fit into the evolution of the Daleks from a writing standpoint but is still a pretty weak showing for them, even though I do like the Movellans as a foil to them.

An interesting thing about the Dalek comic is that their Supreme Leader looks an awful lot like Davros/Emperor in Remembrance and I wonder if that look was actually inspired by the comic.

 

[The Lawgiver]

An interesting thing about the Dalek comic is that their Supreme Leader looks an awful lot like Davros/Emperor in Remembrance and I wonder if that look was actually inspired by the comic.

He is.

Spoiler: Spoiler for several decade old TV show story

A big thing with remembrance is there's the standard color daleks being framed as "renegades" talking to someone that looks like Davros in some sort of dalek computer helmet and the imperial daleks have the big headed design emperor, or at least what looks like a modernized form of it. I don't know how people don't pick up on it but it's basically switched story wise from "ah yeah this is just a renegade faction who doesn't support the cybernetic augmentation the imperials do to themselves" to "these are actually the "real" daleks duking it out with a false emperor kind of scenario"

Spoiler: Really kinda funny spoiler

Also the "davros" we see for like the first half is just some random edgy little kid operating a davros chair shaped computer.

Should probably have brought that up earlier in the post.

 

[GilaCutter]

The Dalek discourse also reminds me of another major grievance I have with modern Doctor Who; considering the Daleks keep coming back and even Davros returned, it really does kind of undermine the whole initial premise of the Doctor having destroyed both them AND his own people, except now the Daleks survived anyway so he basically genocided his own race for nothing. Various showrunners have made an attempt to bring the Timelords back too but have botched or have had it botched.

And I hate the elimination of other Timelords from a writing perspective too because I hate how the Doctor has become this harbinger type character who threatens people by just telling them to look him up, as opposed to not only nobody knowing who the hell he is, but still being accountable to somebody, even if they didn't exactly have the greatest control over him.

 

[Not A Bunny]

The Dalek discourse also reminds me of another major grievance I have with modern Doctor Who; considering the Daleks keep coming back and even Davros returned,

That's all modern stuff now. No one is ever really gone, as long as it's profitable and safe.

There are so few works of fiction that people just kind of go, "yep, that's it, full story told, nothing else to say". Like Cerebus the Aardvark. Or Transmetropolitan.

I think it would have been fantastic if someone said that the Doctor doesn't get any life extensions. He has 13 generations and that's it. But that's not the world we live in.

 

[crowabunga]

The more "subtle" aspects of daleks stayed in early-er nuwho

Like nuwho's dalek appearance started with a fucking dalek who had wartime PTSD and was caged and chained up in some dude's basement alien art collection. Nothing special, nothing unique, just a standard no-name dalek and the doctor encountering each other after both their races were burnt to a crisp.

I need to be careful about making negative universal statements about NuWho, because Dalek always ruins them. What a great episode, but on retrospect ruined by the show and genre it finds itself in: if the 9th Doctor's run was "prestige" TV, a late denouement to a classic sci-fi series, then Dalek's meditations on the shared monstrosity and godlike power of the Daleks as a species and the Doctor himself would work: it's alright to hype up these supreme races and depict the Daleks as unstoppable, streamlined, borderline occult killing machines when it's just one relic, implicitly turning the quaint pepperpots into the sort of borderline-magical precursor race common in sci-fi.

But it wasn't prestige TV, it's Doctor Who! And with the threshold set incredibly high with a DNA-absorbing self-repairing bullet-evaporating oh-and-did-I-mention-that's-just-a-standard-soldier Dalek, now when they inevitably return it becomes absurd that a single person, even an ancient alien, could hope to defeat them. The base power level was set too high for a villain we all know had to reappear.

Come to think of it, I wonder how NuWho would have evolved if the first season was just a "bridge" arc that explored the "lonely god" Doctor fully, and then ended with some sort of universal reset that restored things to the classic Who status quo. The traumatized Time War doctor gets erased along with the super-powered Daleks and other Time War relics, and it ends with Rose meeting the 9th Doctor, David Tennant, showing up on some excursion to earth, a faint hint of deja vu on the Doctor's face as they meet...

 

[BetterFuckChuck]

stubagful is such a little nigger

 

[Vect]

There's a scene where she's extolling how the Doctor is like the sun itself to the villains unaware that Capaldi, standing next to her, is the latest incarnation. For a number of reasons, including that she's finally not looking like the Doctor's auntie and that the placing her at the centre of everything was now done with, there was a glimmer of okay-ishness at the end. But that's it.

I rewatched that scene a few times a week ago (I'm binging on the older revived seasons) and it's quite shocking how profoundly more likable it makes River. She's vulnerable and entirely willing to extol on her love for an impossible man, because she's accepted the absurdity of it and how small she is compared to him. Capaldi completely sells the payoff by underplaying it - it's not romantic, it's not dashing, it's not flirting, it's not teasing, it's just a very gentle, very sincere, heartfelt 'Hello, sweetie." I think it demonstrates that River's obnoxiousness (and varying degrees of criminality) is a front for a very vulnerable side, especially because she has the unique curse of knowing something of her future.

The problem I have with Clara is she's too good. She's too competent, too smart, too quick on her feet, yet the actress sells it completely, sometimes making the Doctor (both Smith and Capaldi) look obsolete, to the point where she even impersonates him believably. She's even responsible for fixing his entire timeline (which is Star Trek Discovery kinds of retconning and I don't like it but anyway). She's actually kind of wasted as a companion. If she wasn't so diminutive, she could have made for an excellent female Doctor.

 

[Overly Serious]

Like Cerebus the Aardvark.

Small world - I was just telling someone about that the other day. It's a good call - Cerebus is almost the archetype for this. Dave Simm said "300 issues, Cerebus's life and death" and stuck to it. So far as I know even the weird little cross-over cameos like with TMNT were done whilst the main Cerebus run was ongoing and nothing after.

(Also, boy was that series tough to read in places).

The problem I have with Clara is she's too good. She's too competent, too smart, too quick on her feet, yet the actress sells it completely, sometimes making the Doctor (both Smith and Capaldi) look obsolete, to the point where she even impersonates him believably. She's even responsible for fixing his entire timeline (which is Star Trek Discovery kinds of retconning and I don't like it but anyway). She's actually kind of wasted as a companion. If she wasn't so diminutive, she could have made for an excellent female Doctor.

I don't disagree. But again, she was a character they spoiled for me rather than inherently obnoxious. There have been smart companions before. Nyssa was smart. Adric was smart (though he'll never know if he was right). Hell, K9 knocks all of them into a cocked hat for being a know-it-all. I feel the problem with Clara is that they got rid of her flaws. She absolutely had them - she could be obnoxious, arrogant, prickly as Hell. And she was eternally a little bit annoyed that the Doctor was smarter than her. The only point of divergence in our views, if there even is one, is that I tend to say that the problem is that they got rid of her flaws. She became emotionally super-competent, plot-special (the timeline stuff you mentioned, becoming essentially a time lord at the end). It's frustrating because she really started off just great and the actress was very charming. They did the same thing they do with all female characters. Turn them into some kind of infallible, pedestal standing, weird idol/mother figure. Who writers have issues.

Anyway, as regards the Dalek conversation, does anybody else remember hiding behind the sofa from this? Daleks used to be scary, man.